He hopped in place inside the shade of a barn with one leg pointed impossibly straight up in the air and the other hanging down, struggling for a foothold. He was a wobbly blob of feathers.

Penguin was born with his legs sprouting from his chest, and chickens that disfigured aren’t normally spared long. But a veterinarian, urged on by a sympathetic vet tech, took pity on him and performed surgery on his legs, moving them roughly to where they normally should be.

But then what to do with a handicapped chicken that can’t really walk?

Like a lucky few animals in similar straits, Penguin found a place where he can live out his life.

SASHA Farm is 75 pastoral acres of soft grass, flowered pasture, red barns and round bales of hay. It’s the grazing grounds for hundreds of animals that were abused, neglected or sick before being brought here. Now they spend their days being fed, housed and taken care of.

There are a number of shelters and rescues where abused or unhealthy cats and dogs can go, but few are available for livestock. It’s usually not worth the effort to care for them, and on commercial farms that house thousands of animals at a time, those like Penguin are usually eliminated quickly.

“We seek them out because it’s important for them to have a place to go,” said Christine Wagner, the farm’s 35-year-old operations manager. “A lot of people would just euthanize them ’cause it’s not worth their time or money.”

But the owners and volunteers at SASHA, which stands for Sanctuary and Safe Haven for Animals, believe that even animals deemed useless deserve a chance to live.

“On some farms, you hear the term ‘culling’ a lot, being kind of scrapped like trash, but it’s a life,” Wagner said of the weakest animals. “That’s why we seek out older and special-needs animals, because people would scrap them, and we just don’t agree with them. We don’t do that here.”

'Every animal here
has a story'

Dorothy Davies and her husband, Monte Jackson, never intended to house the outcasts of the animal world.

The couple moved from Westland to rural Manchester in 1984 to grow their own food on their own farm, and among that food was a handful of chickens they’d raised.

But the first time they had to slaughter one for dinner became the last time.

“It was horrible,” said Davies, 66. “That was it. There was no going back after trying to cut a chicken’s head off.”

The pair became vegetarians, then vegans. They let their remaining chickens live, which were soon joined by a couple of goats and horses.

Jackson was a truck driver, a career he retired from after a bad traffic accident that broke his neck and back in several places. Davies was director of the local library, a job she had to quit to take care of the growing number of animals on their farm.

Since then, they’ve devoted themselves full-time to their nonprofit farm, which is bursting at the seams with 20 cows, 22 chickens, 21 potbellied pigs, 40 goats, 24 sheep, 26 pigeons, a dozen ducks, six horses, three donkeys and a mule. There are even a couple of emus.

Only so much room

Miles the pit bull was rescued from New Orleans during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

Ten goats were penned into a Detroit backyard, where the recent immigrant who owned the property had a home slaughterhouse. Jackson and Davies suddenly owned several more goats.

A farmer in Dexter simply stopped feeding his 30 cows. By the time Jackson heard about it and got there, only five were alive. He took them back to SASHA.

Izzie the dog came from an amateur dog rescue operation where the animals were neglected and starving — the very fate the rescue was supposed to save them from.

Jefferson the cow escaped a slaughterhouse in Detroit’s Eastern Market a decade ago and ran through busy city streets in the middle of the day until being stopped in his tracks on Jefferson Avenue by a tranquilizer gun. His escape brought headlines for days, and the resulting donations brought him to the farm.

But most animals here were found quietly, anonymously. A horse confined to a cripplingly small pen his whole life. Ponies owned by an abusive drunk. Former racehorses too old to run anymore.

The farm is only so big, though, and has only so many resources. SASHA gets countless calls from people who want to bring animals there, and most of the time the staff has to politely and sadly decline because there’s not enough room or money or volunteers.

“It’s hard for us to say no when someone calls, and the phone rings constantly,” Davies said. “It gets very stressful. I mean, people call you crying and you have to say, ‘I’m sorry, we just don’t have room.’ That’s a tough thing to do. But we can’t save them all.”

Worth the effort

The phone in the office rang once again. Wagner answered.

Someone’s elderly father in Minnesota was being sent to an assisted-living facility, leaving behind eight sheep on his farm, the caller said. Could SASHA come get them and take them in?

Well, Wagner said, not really. “But I can see if there’s somewhere closer to you that can,” she offered the caller.

Not that they haven’t taken long road trips to bring back animals before. A cow in Alabama. Another one running loose on Long Island. And the cattle that leaped from a semi in Grand Rapids and hid in the woods for weeks.

But these days the farm has enough animals to worry about locally, like the nine cows and two oxen they’re trying to get from a farm that someone in Dexter just bought. The new owner wanted them gone fast and threatened to shoot them all if SASHA didn’t take them off his hands. He set a deadline, and the couple was scrambling to raise enough money to take them in.

Rescuing a handful of cows from a farm, a gaggle of goats from a yard, or even a single woeful chicken whose legs point all over the place may not seem that impactful overall, but even if all of the animals brought to their attention can’t possibly be saved, here on the farm they say it’s worth the effort to save at least a few.

“Our belief is that they have fears, they have compassion for their offspring, they like to eat, they like to breathe the same as you and I,” Jackson said. “They’re no different than we are. They enjoy life the same as we do.”